Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1416-1418

...no less than nine provincial and territorial capital leaders support basic income or at least pilot projects, with innumerable smaller city and town mayors across the nation declaring their support as well. They know — as government leaders who are closest to the people — that a guaranteed income would reduce inequities in their communities, reduce crime, improve health outcomes, and strengthen social cohesion.

The stage is now set for a basic income for all

Sheila Regehr and Roderick Benns

Published on Thu Feb 11 2016

thestar.com

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[Bill] Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and immediately sought to prove it by dismantling the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). The welfare-reform legislation that he signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008—replaced the federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions, and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later restored).

Experts and pundits disagree about the true impact of welfare reform, but one thing seems clear: Extreme poverty doubled to 1.5 million in the decade and a half after the law was passed. What is extreme poverty? US households are considered to be in extreme poverty if they are surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day in any given month. We tend to think of extreme poverty existing in Third World countries, but here in the United States, shocking numbers of people are struggling to survive on less money per month than many families spend in one evening dining out. Currently, the United States, the richest nation on the planet, has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the developed world.

...Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. During Clinton’s tenure, funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”
Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote
By Michelle Alexander
February 10, 2016
THE NATION
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 Right wing MEPs in the European Parliament including UK conservatives today voted car makers a 'get out of jail free' card over air pollution that's killing tens of thousands of citizens a year, allowing their vehicles to emit double the legal limit for nitrogen oxides.

Friends of the Earth air pollution campaigner Jenny Bates said: "It beggars belief that politicians are weakening pollution standards for new vehicles when people are dying from filthy air. These watered-down EU standards were supported by the UK Government, despite the fact that tens of thousands of its residents die early every year from air pollution which breaches legal health limits.

...However, the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA) said in a position paper seen by Reuters that the Commission's reform plans were 'too challenging' for current diesel models and could threaten the technology as a whole, jeopardising jobs across the region.
 MEPs vote for killer car pollution at double the legal limit
EurActiv
Ecologist
3rd February 2016
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thanks to Meg Howarth